A Decade of Protesting Christopher Columbus Plays Out at Mission San Juan Capistrano Today

Columbus Day was marked Monday, but some folks in no mood to celebrate explorer Christopher Columbus arrive outside the gates at Mission San Juan Capistrano at 11 this morning for "Orange County's 10th annual Anti-Columbus Day Protest."

"Concerned members of the community," who include everywhere-agitator Naui Huitzilopochtli, explain their reasons for the protest after the jump . . .

"In the last 500 years since Columbus invaded our lands," reads the group's announcement, "in addition to the terrorizing of our Anahuac people, the theft of our lands and the theft of our wealth and natural resources, we have seen: the enslavement of our people; our life-or-death forced conversion to Christianity; the destruction of our Anahuac cities; the burning of our libraries; the execution of our leaders; the theft and/or destruction of our cultural wealth; the theft of our labor; and the theft of our true Anahuac identity, history, heritage, and theology."

While some see the mission as a historical marker of Europeans "civilizing" California, others see it as our Old World version of Dachau.

Meeting and greeting Indians, 1492.

Here's video from last year's protest:

Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before "graduating" to OC Weekly in 1995 as the paper's first calendar editor. He has contributed as a freelance editor and writer to several publications and been the subject of or featured in several reports online, in print and on the radio and television. One of countless times he returned to his Costa Mesa, CA, home with a bounty of awards from a journalism competition, his wife told him to take out the trash.